Deadlock

Miriam ran upstairs narrowly ahead of her thoughts. In the small enclosure of her room they surged about her, gathering power from the familiar objects silently waiting to share her astounded contemplation of the fresh material. She swept joyfully about the room ducking and doubling to avoid arrest until she should have discovered some engrossing occupation. But in the instant’s pause at each eagerly opened drawer and cupboard, her mind threw up images. It was useless. There was no escape up here. Pelted from within and without, she paused in laughter with clasped restraining hands⁠ ⁠… the rest of the evening must be spent with people⁠ ⁠… the nearest; the Baileys; she would go down into the dining-room and be charming with the Baileys until tomorrow’s busy thoughtless hours were in sight. Halfway downstairs she remembered that the forms waiting below, for so long unnoticed and unpondered, might be surprised, perhaps affronted by her sudden interested reappearance. She rushed on. She could break through that barrier. Mrs. Bailey’s quiet withholding dignity would end in delight over a shared gay acknowledgment that her house was looking up.

She opened the dining-room door, facing in advance the family gathered at needlework under the gaslight, an island group in the waste of dreary increasing shabbiness⁠ ⁠… she would ask some question, apologising for disturbing them. The room seemed empty; the gas was turned dismally low. Only one light was on, the once new, drearily hopeful incandescent burner.

He listened in his subdued controlled way to her remark and again she saw him surrounded by his world of foreign universities and professors, and wondered for a sharp instant whether she were betraying some dreadful English, middle-class, newspaper ignorance; perhaps there were no longer any comets; they were called by some other name⁠ ⁠… he might know whether there was still a nebular theory and whether anything more had been done about the electrical contact of metals⁠ ⁠… that man in the Revue des deux Mondes saying that the first outbreak of American literature was unfortunately feminine. Mill thought intuition at least as valuable as ratiocination.⁠ ⁠… Mill; he could read Mill. Emerson would be a secret attack on him, an eloquent spokesman for things no foreigner would agree with. “Ah yes,” he said thoughtfully, “I always have had great interest for astronomy, but now please tell me,” he lifted yesterday’s radiant face. Had there been yesterday that glow of crimson tie showing under the point of his black beard and the gold watch-chain across the blackness of his waistcoat? “how I shall obtain admission to the British Moozayum.”

Miriam gave instructions delightedly. Mr. Shatov hunched crookedly in his chair, his head thrown up and listening towards her, his eyebrows raised as if he were singing and on his firm small mouth the pursed look of a falsetto note. His brown eyes were filmed, staring averted, as if fixed on some faraway thing that did not move; it was like the expression in the eyes of Mr. Helsing but older and less scornful.

She hurried through her Saturday morning’s work, trying to keep warm. Perhaps it was nervousness and excitement about the afternoon’s appointment that made her seem so cold. At the end of her hour’s finicking work in Mr. Hancock’s empty fireless room, amongst cold instruments and chilly bottles of chemicals she was cold through. There was no one in the house but Mr. Leyton and the cousin; nothing to support her against the coming ordeal. Mr. Leyton had had an empty morning and spent it busily scrubbing and polishing instruments in his warm little room; retiring towards lunch time to the den fire with a newspaper. Shivering over her ledgers in the cold window space, she bitterly resented her inability to go out and get warm in an A.B.C. before meeting Mr. Shatov in the open. Impossible. It could not be afforded; though this morning all the absolutely essential work could be finished by one o’clock. It was altogether horrible. She was not sure that she was even supposed to stay for lunch on Saturday. The day ended at one o’clock; unless she were kept by some urgent business, there was no excuse. Today she must have finished everything before lunch to keep her appointment. It could not be helped; and at least there was no embarrassment in the presence of Mr. Leyton and the boy. She would even lock up and put on her outdoor things and go down in them.

“Now I am pairfectly happy,” he said as he passed through the swing doors of the reading-room. His head was up radiantly singing, he was rushing trustfully forward, looking at nothing, carrying her on, close at his side, till they reached the barrier of the outmost catalogue desk. He pulled up facing her, with wide wild eyes looking at nothing. “We shall at once take Anakarayninna in English” he shouted in an enthusiastic whisper.

“We must choose seats before we get books,” murmured Miriam. There was plenty to do and explain; the revelation of her meagre attack on the riches of the library need not yet come. Were they to read together? Had he reached his goal “midst all those literatures” to spend his time in showing her Tolstoy? He followed her absently about as she filled in the time while they waited for their book, by showing all she knew of the routine of the library. “There shall of course,” he said in a gruff explanatory tone, arresting her near the entrance to the central enclosure, “be a quite exhaustive system of catalogue, but I find there is too much formalities; with all these little baskets.” “Ssh,” begged Miriam leading him away. She drifted to the bookshelves, showing him the one shelf she knew on the south side; there was a reader on a ladder at the very shelf. “Carlyle’s French Revolution is up there,” she said confidently. “Na, na,” he growled reproachfully, “this is a most purely unreliable fictional history, a tour de force from special individual prejudices. You should take rather Thiers.”

Mrs. Bailey, hurrying through the hall to dinner, came forward dropping bright quiet cries of welcome from the edge of her fullest mood of excited serenity, gently chiding Miriam’s inbreaking expectant unpreparedness with her mysterious gradual way of imparting bit by bit, so that it was impossible to remember how and when she had begun, the new thing; lingering silently at the end of her story to disarm objections before she turned and flitted, with a reassuring pleading backward smile, into her newly crowded dining-room. A moment later Miriam was in the drawing-room, swiftly consulting the profile of a tweed-clad form bent busily writing at the little table under the gas. The man leapt up and faced her with a swift ironic bow, strode to the hearthrug and began to speak. She remained rooted in the middle of the room amplifying her impression as his sentence went on, addressed not to her, though he occasionally flung a cold piercing glance her way, but to the whole room, in a high, narrowly-rounded, fluting tone as if he were speaking into a cornet. His head had gone up above the level of the brighter light but it looked even more greyish yellow than before, the sparse hair, the eyes, the abruptly branching moustache moving most remarkably with his fluting voice, the pale tweed suit, all one even yellowish grey, and his whole reared up, half soldierly form, at bay, as if the room were full of jeering voices. His long declamation contained all that Mrs. Bailey had said and told her also that the lecture was about Spanish literature. London was extraordinary. A Frenchman, suddenly giving a lecture in English on Spanish literature; at the end of next week.